Back End Developer

“Today I am primarily a back-end developer. Although I started my web career with front end, once I started to use PHP I never looked back. Working with a server as opposed to a browser allowed me to build highly complex systems and take advantage of the huge number of APIs available. With the emergence of front-end frameworks, front and back end development are unified in many aspects but working with PHP always gives me a different and unique experience and I consider myself a back-end developer.”

100+

PHP applications built

PHP Developer

I have worked with a large selection of back end frameworks from legacy frameworks to the most powerful and modern today. Laravel to me is the easiest, best structured, and most powerful PHP framework available today for custom PHP applications. Laravel provides so much powerful functionality out of the box and its extremely easy to customise your application. I’ve worked on a number of Laravel applications for small personal projects to large scale enterprise PHP applications for huge global clients. It makes life much simpler for a PHP developer.

Laravel

5

Laravel PHP Applications built

Laracon EU - Amsterdam 2015

Attending industry events is important to keep up to date with the latest emerging tech and features and offers great networking opportunities. Laracon EU in Amsterdam in 2015 was a great and informative experience.

(CMS) Content Management System Developer

I do CMS back end development primarily in a content management system called SilverStripe. It’s a robust, secure, and scalable system that gives lots of power and freedom to content editors in the admin, while having a very easy back end development experience. I also have back end CMS experience with the newer versions of Drupal. Although I have some experience with Wordpress also it’s not a system I enjoy developing for. SilverStripe has proven itself to me as the go to system for both small and large back end CMS driven applications.

SilverStripe

Wordpress

30+

SilverStripe CMS Applications built

StripeCon EU - Ljubljana, Slovenia 2016

I gave a talk on a SilverStripe CMS SEO plugin at StripeCon 2016 which went down very well with the attendees and shared some of my SilverStripe experience with the community.

Ecommerce Application Developer

Having used Magento and Opencart as well as working in a company ecommerce environment for years as a back-end developer, I have a solid understanding about what makes a great ecommerce application and experience for a customer. Ecommerce application development can be a challenge as it usually involves a high level of back end customisation on an already complex system, but it can be enjoyable creating something hugely complex and watching the conversions and purchases flow.

Magento

4

Ecommerce Applications built

(OOP) Object Oriented Programming

Over the years I have learned a lot of interesting, useful, and powerful concepts around back end PHP development including dependency injection, routing, services, APIs, and at the heart of all of these is objects. It took me years to fully understand how objects can interact with each other and be created in ways that makes them independent and re-usable across different PHP applications.

(MVC) Model View Controller Development

One of my favourite back end development architecture patterns to work with is the model, view, controller pattern. It allows a clean separation between, data, presentation, and control logic. I love this pattern so much I spent months building different back end MVC frameworks with custom templating systems, request handing, routing, and CMS elements.

API and Web Service Development

It is not only the advancement in PHP and PHP frameworks over the last few years that have allowed me to build more powerful back end systems, but also how companies have opened up their platforms through APIs to allow the free flow of data between applications. Whether a social media website login, a postcode lookup, or a geolocation tool, web services have left everything you will ever need at your fingertips and can easily be integrated to an existing PHP application with minimal effort.

Custom PHP 7 Application Developer

While all back-end PHP applications require some sort of customisation, I can build PHP applications from scratch using only custom code or drawing on composer modules to enhance functionality. I work with the latest versions of PHP when developing new systems and try to future proof my work and make it as scalable as possible. There is always some enjoyment to be had when building something from scratch that’s completely your own, the only drawback can be when you have a massive back end application to build its not feasible to build everything from scratch.

Alcatraz - San Francisco 2018

Building secure and rock-solid PHP applications which adhere to OWASP principles is at the core of all of my development projects